It was drizzling and foggy in the early afternoon as our taxi driver, Jacques Fraser, loaded our luggage onto the deck of his little motorboat and pulled away from the south shore of the St. Lawrence River for the four-kilometre trip north to Île Verte.

His namesake and ancestor, James Fraser, had to paddle his way to Île Verte in 1785 when, as superintendent of navigation of the St. Lawrence for the British colonial administration in Quebec, he arrived on the island to a prove a point.

The waters off the north coast of this island east of Rivière-du-Loup were known to him as being acutely dangerous to shipping — particularly at low tide, when ships were at risk of striking rocks just below the water surface. There were as many as 30 shipwrecks a year in area in the late 1700s, and James Fraser thought the north coast needed a lighthouse. To prove his point, he kept a fire going for two years on the north coast, and recorded a corresponding drop in ship mishaps. As a result, Quebec’s first lighthouse was built on Île Verte from 1806 to 1809, on the very same patch of land where Fraser had kept his fires going.

The lighthouse stayed in full operation, manned by two families, until 1972. These days, it is one of the island’s principal tourist attractions, as well as a bed-and-breakfast operation operated by a non-profit island corporation headed by island native Gerald Dionne, who was waiting to greet my wife, son and me as Jacques Fraser pulled up on the south shore of Île Verte after a 20-minute crossing that cost US$21.

We had booked rooms for the night in the assistant lightkeeper’s house, which is adjacent to the lightkeeper’s house, where the only guest for the 20 hours that we were there was a francophone woman who had come for five days of solitude to help her meet a writing deadline for a television script.

It wasn’t a long ride in Dionne’s car from the taxi drop-off to the lighthouse facility — just a short three kilometres due north from the south shore to the north shore. After arriving, it didn’t take long to sense that there was something tremendously comforting about the solitude in and around the lighthouse and old homes. Even though the lighthouse isn’t staffed anymore, the revolving light beam at the top of it still runs automatically. Beside the lighthouse are two black cast-iron cannons, which used to provide the sound warnings in tandem with the light warnings until the lighthouse finally got its own foghorn in 1944.

There are only two roads on Île Verte — both dirt roads. There’s the three-kilometre road linking the south-shore wharf to the lighthouse, and an intersecting east-west road running the full 12-kilometre breadth of the island. There’s plenty to do, though, particularly for cyclists (there are bike rentals available on Île Verte), as well as walkers. The most popular walk is along the north shore, where visitors are certain to see whales in summer months. Because Île Verte is out near the middle of the St. Lawrence, not far from the mouth of the Saguenay River, visitors don’t need boats to get up close with the whales. People can see them — and hear them — very close to the shoreline.

There are two museums on the island worth seeing. The first is the Musee Ecole Michaud, which tells the history of Île Verte inside an old two-storey schoolhouse. There, visitors learn that the island’s population peaked in the 1920s, when most residents worked harvesting sea moss at low tide. The moss was packaged into bales, like bales of hay, and shipped to Detroit for use as packing inside of seats in the new Model T Ford. Today, by contrast, there are only 30 full-time residents left on Île Verte, none of whom are children. But the number rises to 180 in summer, and ever since the island got car-ferry service linking it to the south-shore mainland in 1990, the number of new summer residences under construction has grown.

The second museum on Île Verte is known nationally, and internationally. It is the quirky Musee du squelette, situated in an old barn and devoted to skeletons of all sorts, from whales on down to hummingbirds, including humans. It was founded and is operated by Pierre-Henry Fontaine, a retired biology teacher and author whose textbook Whales and Seals: Biology and Ecology, has been deemed to be the best of its kind by James Mead, curator emeritus of the mammal collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. One of the skulls on display, in fact, is Fontaine’s own skull. Or at least a replica of it. Using a brain scan of his head, he was able to get a mould and cast made identical in shape and size to his own skull.

For dinner, Dionne let us borrow his car to drive out to the western end of Île Verte to the four-table, 12-seat restaurant that Michelle Dionne and Denis Cusson operate in a room in their own home. As we listened to a recording of Leonard Cohen singing in English, we enjoyed a lovely six-course meal (with Atlantic cod as the principal dish) for $27 per person. We paid cash. In fact, we made sure to bring cash with us, as there are no banks on Île Verte. Nor are there any stores or gas stations.

Back at the lighthouse by sunset, we were happy to have the whole assistant lightkeeper’s house for ourselves. We anticipated a deeply restful night, and that’s exactly what we got. It cost $140 total for the night, including a full breakfast.

We caught the first morning car ferry back to the mainland, where we had parked our car for the night. As the south shore of the St. Lawrence River grew closer, we looked back and saw Île Verte getting smaller and smaller on the northern horizon. It felt sad leaving. It felt like we were coming out of a beautiful dream, that we had had a chance to toggle back and forth between the past and the present, between James Fraser and Jacques Fraser, and feel a sense of communion with the island.

To this day, the lighthouse that is James Fraser’s legacy and the two lightkeeper’s homes beside it are the only dwellings on the north coast of Île Verte.

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